Your Guardian Angel
by PrincessOfTheNight93
Summary: Angela Ziegler was always destined to change the world. She just never knew what kind of an impact she would make, or the difference that joining a small group of heroes would make in her life.
1. Chapter 1

Long-ass introductory note incoming:  
1\. I'm...not entirely sure what this is. It originally started as what I wanted to be a huge oneshot, but as is the case with me, it grew completely out of hand. It won't be super long, I'm thinking probably 6-7 chapters but god knows I'm fucktastic at outlining anything so we'll see where this ends length-wise.  
2\. Ships won't be coming into it until towards the end; this is more so an exploration of Angela's life. It follows her life and all the major lore-related points in Overwatch's history that involved Angela. So, the creation of the staff and the Valkryie suit, Angela's life before Overwatch (including her parents' deaths and her living with Torb for a while), her life after the fall, Uprising, Genji's surgery, dabbles into her relationship with Moira, and I'm sure a lot more shit I have outlined that I'm forgetting about right now.  
3\. Fareeha is a kid in the beginning, but there's absolutely nothing romantic between them until we get to post-fall. Don't worry about that. It's a Pharmercy fic, but not for a while into it.  
4\. I'm aware Mercy's timeline is a little messed up; I initially thought that she joined Overwatch at 18 years of age and spent two full hours mapping out the broken mess that is Overwatch's timeline, and planning the entire fic around it. So when it was brought to my attention that Mercy didn't join Overwatch until she was in her early 20s, I decided I quite frankly do not give a fuck because there's no force in hell on earth that will get me to try to make sense of this series' timeline again. It's pretty much all Tracer's fault, but I'm not gonna get into it. So you get a slightly young Dr. Ziegler. Go crazy.  
5\. Just a warning, while there's no character death involving canon characters, the 'deaths' of characters as Angela knows them (Ana, Jack, and Gabriel) is referenced.  
6\. I...hate the fact that half the fucking cast of Overwatch don't have callsigns so I'm rectifying that for the sake of consistency.  
Jack, Gabe, Ana, and Reinhardt are just referred to by their titles. So, Strike Commander, Captain Reyes, Captain Amari, and Lieutenant respectively.  
McCree = Ranger (100% not inspired by Walker Texas Ranger I have no idea where you'd ever get that idea)  
Torbjörn = Engineer (maybe you should go back to playing tf2)  
Genji = Sparrow (don't give me that look)  
Moira = Wraith (lololol I don't think Moira is even gonna be on any missions in this fic but I'm sticking this here for reference)  
Winston is exempt because he's a talking gorilla, he doesn't have an identity to hide. Mei is exempt because she's probably not gonna be referenced much. She's a bit distanced from the other original members, anyway.

* * *

The first time Angela Ziegler set foot on a battlefield, she was three. She didn't remember it, but didn't have to.

War was something that every child her age grew up with. The Crisis Generation, the older folks called them. An entire generation of children, raised in a warzone. They never saw what the peaceful era was like, from those long-bygone days from before the Omnics declared their hatred of people, and responded with a global bloodbath. Cites reduced to rubble, entire families slaughtered, rural communities completely purged from existence, leaving only husks of homes and shrapnel behind to leave a hint as to what ended the peace they once knew.

No nation was safe from the touch of the Omnics, and every human in the world was left wondering when they'd be next, or which type of machine would eventually destroy them. The Bastions, with their machine guns and tank shells, the Eradicators, with their impregnable shields, the O-Rs, with their barriers and iron-clad defenses. Any one of them could tear a home to pieces in a matter of minutes. For most children her age, it was not merely a fear, but a reality, not a question of "if", but rather "when". Humanity had been trying for nearly a decade to gain a hold in this 'war', as some laughably called it, but it was more accurately dubbed by some as a lost cause. With the Omnics becoming stronger by the day, it looked like the end of humanity was an inevitable reality.

Those were the stories Angela grew up with, and for the first few years of her life, before she even knew what an Omnic was, there was peace in her home. When she was three, the first Omnics came near her home in the Swiss Alps. The modest town she grew up in was evacuated for a few weeks, while local law enforcement came up with a peaceful solution to keep robots out of the area. She returned home with her parents, and they lived their lives with content, untouched by the horrors of far-off nations who preferred a more violent approach to their conflicts than Switzerland did. Killings were not unheard of in her home country, but they were certainly more rare, as the government desperately did anything they could to appease the machines, terrified of the carnage they could inflict.

When Angela was five, she became interested in the way things were made. It was not merely enough for her to just accept something in a state of being, she wanted to see how it worked, how it came to be. She wanted to know what laid behind the outer shell of everything she touched. She started by tearing her toys apart. At first, her parents brushed it off as a destructive phase, but one night, as her father sat on the couch behind her, he was able to see past the dismembered plastic doll in her hands and saw the way her brows furrowed, the way her eyes absolutely shone with a curiosity that was far stronger than anything a child her age should have been making. And so, the Ziegler's began to indulge in their daughter's special interest, showering her with praise and buying her toys especially to break and broken computers to toy with.

By the time she was six people started to call her other things.

"A genius," a distant uncle once said to her father, nodding approvingly as she rolled a computer chip around in her fingers.

"A prodigy," one of her mother's friends called her, watching her play around with the innards of a stuffed animal as she drank tea at their kitchen table.

"Gifted," a teacher told both her parents, shortly after her initial enrollment in primary school.

Her parents would always roll their eyes at such words, and tell her that she was Angela to them. Nothing more, and that was all she ever needed to be. She definitely preferred being called Angela than any of those other names.

One night, Angela awoke to a deafening roar around her. Before she had time to process it, before her heart could even fully leap out of her chest, the ceiling of her bedroom came crashing down around her. The eight-year-old barely had time to roll over onto her stomach and instinctively cover the back of her head with her arms before she was pinned down to her bed by layers of rubble. The fact that it didn't immediately kill her was a miracle, but that did very little to settle the panic that quickly rose to her chest as she felt a warm fluid trickle down her face on both sides.

With her heart pounding in her chest and her body aching, Angela called out for her parents, but no reply came. Only the muffled sounds of machines and gunfire and explosions and screaming and sirens played in the distance, reminding Angela of all the stories she had heard. Terror the likes of which she had never experienced before tore at her very soul, as she laid herself flat against her bed and tried to drown the songs of war out with the sounds of her own sobs and calls for help.

She wasn't sure how long she laid there like that. Time seemed to inch by slowly, but it could have been less than an hour for all she knew. Still, gradually, the sounds faded away, bringing only silence from the outside. It was shortly after that, that someone lifted some of the weight off her small form, letting out a surprised sound when she looked up at him.

It was not a man that Angela recognized. He was wearing a uniform that she did, however. He was a solider. With gentle arms, he shifted the last of the ceiling off of her and lifted her out of the remains of her home. That was when Angela finally got a looked at the carnage that she had only been able to listen to earlier.

Her hometown was on fire; the sky was filled with clouds of smoke, every house on her street was leveled, filled with gunshots and tank shells. Destroyed machines laid strewn throughout the frames of what was once homes. Out of the corner of her eye, Angela saw a flash of a silvery platinum blonde on the ground, identical to her own hair color, and she began to turn her head. However, the solider firmly pressed her face against his shoulder, not allowing her to get a clear look in any directed but behind him.

"Let's get you looked at, yeah?" he said instead, taking care to not allow her to look back at her house as he carried her in the opposite direction. His grip tightened on her ever so slightly as her tears started to stain the front of his shirt.

* * *

She was brought to a huge, long building - it looked sort of like a school from the outside, with a somewhat large yard surrounding the entire building, the back of it fenced off, and ring of trees and flowers surrounding the entire structure. A house filled with nearly one-hundred other young girls who had their lives torn apart by the gunfire of an Omnic. An orphanage. Before the Crisis, orphanages had been all but phased out in exchange for a more structured fostering system, but that was a thing of the past. The resulting death tolls meant that thousands upon thousands of families were torn apart, millions of children left with nobody, or with traumatized, shell-shocked parents that could no longer care for them, or with family units that could simply no longer afford the cost of a child. Such was the toll of war.

Buildings with the purpose of housing children until they could find guardians started springing up in even the most developed of nations, and Switzerland was no exception. They gave it a different name. The adults who took care of them never used the word 'orphanage', they called it a Girl's Home, but it was anything but a home to Angela. And while the stand-in caretakers did a good job, never mistreated her or any other girls who were forced to call the institution a home, it was a far cry from the love, support and pride her parents had showered her in.

Among the caretakers, the one who worked with Angela the most was an older woman who introduced herself as Mrs. Kaiser. Mrs. Kaiser was in charge of the admission and discharge of every girl who passed through those doors, and it was her that tried to find good matches between her charges and the adults who wanted to give them homes. The day she first arrived, she gave Angela a tour of the huge house, showed her where she would eat and sleep and play. Most of that day passed by in a haze, as images much more horrific than a cafeteria were burned into her brain. The only part Angela truly remembered was finally sitting down on the end of the bed, burying her head in her hands and crying. She trembled and sobbed as the shock of the day's events caught up to her, hardly able to breathe, with no concept of who was around her.

Angela's body gave a small jolt when the bed shifted beside her and a pair of arms wrapped around her tiny frame, pulling her into a tight hug. Mrs. Kaiser stroked her head gently, just holding her until the sobs began to quiet. Angela had no idea how long they sat there like that, but the woman waited it out, just held her like that until she was ready to stop the tears.

"You'll be alright, Angela." Her voice was soft, kind. Angela would have almost called it motherly, had she not been unwilling to ever use such a term to describe anyone but her own mother. "Everything will be okay."

Angela Ziegler spent her ninth birthday in an orphanage. There was no celebration for her, no brightly wrapped boxes and bags, no singing, none of her favorite food. It came by and passed like any other day, for she was nothing special in the huge house that no part of her considered a home. She was just a face in a crowd of a hundred other girls just like her. They had all been displaced by war; there was nothing unique about her situation, nothing that made her more or less tragic than the brunette that slept above her, the blonde to her left, or the redhead to her right. They were all just remnants of desecrated families. The last to hold their family's names, but completely alone.

After the first night, Angela tried not to cry in front of other people. The atmosphere in the orphanage was bleak enough. Nobody there was happy, and it seemed every day someone was leaving, and somebody else would arrive, wounds of their new loss bleeding heavily as sniffles and muffled sobs could be heard in the shared bedroom every single night. On the eve of her ninth birthday, she cried into her pillow, but did so silently, as to not disturb the people around her.

She spent her tenth birthday in an orphanage, too, but by that time, she had no tears left to shed. Instead of being gripped by sorrow and drowning in old memories, Angela threw herself into her studies. By the time she was ten years old, her interest in the inner workings of devices and toys had grown into a nearly insatiable appetite to learn. She quickly surpassed all the girls her own age in the lessons that were taught at the orphanage, her level of comprehension rivaling even girls two or three years older than she was. Very few people noticed that, however. Either that, or they simply did not acknowledge it, never encouraged her like her parents used to. It didn't bother Angela, however. She just continued to learn more from books and time spent on one of the old computers in the playroom.

After their daily lessons, people would arrive throughout the day, usually adults. Occasionally, a girl would be taken out of the various rooms they had for entertainment, given a chance to talk to the adults, and if things went well, they'd go home with them. They were the lucky ones.

Angela only did that once, and it went terribly, as she was barely able to strike up any kind of conversation with them and spent most of the meeting staring at her feet. She was different than the other girls, she had quickly noticed. While the other children ran around in their groups of friends, playing and screaming and laughing, she would quiety read. She'd always watch the other girls, but politely declined when she was offered a place in their games. She preferred to watch. They still didn't call her Angela at the orphanage, either. Instead of "genius" and "prodigy". She was called "weird" and "freak". When they thought she wasn't listening, she'd hear the caretakers call her "shy" and "too quiet". They worried for her because of that.

Adoption was a word that she heard thrown around a lot. To many, it was a competition, or at least that's how it seemed to Angela. There was a strong attitude of wanting, needing to stand out, that you had to appeal to the adults who came by. It had been almost two years since she came to the orphanage, and sometimes the caretakers would pull her aside. Two years was evidently too long for a kid to only have had one adoption interview the entire time they'd been there. They would always tell her that they weren't scolding her, but they would speak to her in a tone of voice that told her otherwise. They would tell her that they only wanted what was best for her, that they wanted her to find a home where she would be happy, and it was difficult if all she did was sit aside and read all day long.

Angela secretly hated the idea of being adopted. She was the last of her family, the last person to carry the name Ziegler, and her name was the only fragment of her old life she had left to hold on to. Having a real home might have sounded nice, but she didn't want that to be at the cost of her identity. And a house would never be a home without her parents. The only person she ever told that to was Mrs. Kaiser, who just gave her a smile and told her that her parents would be happier to know she had found a place where she belonged.

Angela didn't agree that she would ever 'belong' with a group of strangers, but kept her comments to herself.

And so, life went on.

Her eleventh birthday passed. As her relatively peaceful life continued, the carnage of the Omnics continued as well. However, for the first time in her life, there were whispers in the air, some tiny shred of hope that people seemed to be slowly buying into. There were rumors of a new foundation forming, an international group of soldiers and scientists who were speaking of coming together to give humanity a fighting chance against the Omnics. She wrote if off as a false hope, as she herself had seen what those machines could do. There was no fighting back against that. All that could be done was to mend the damage. Not prevent it, but to heal it.

One day, while she was sitting on a loveseat in a back corner of a room filled with noise, the couch shifted behind her. She looked up from her book briefly, expecting to see one of the staff who worked in the orphanage, but instead was looking at a man she had never seen before in her life.

"You must be Angela," he grunted. His voice was rough, course, but not unkind. His appearance was very much the same way; the man was short, but his arms absolutely bulged with muscle, and his face was buried in a mane of blonde hair that covered both his head and his face. One of his eyes were covered with an eyepatch. Giving her a smile, he reached one of his hands out to her. Angela took it silently, before nodding her head once.

"My name is Torbjörn. Would you like to take a walk with me, Angela?"

For a moment, Angela noticed Mrs. Kaiser standing only a short distance away. When she saw Angela hesitate to answer him, the old woman gave her a very stern look that told her she'd be heavily scolded later if she refused his offer. Angela nodded once more, and stood up.

* * *

"I was told you've been here a while."

Her eyes shifted to the ground beneath her as the two of them walked across the grassy backyard of the orphanage. It almost seemed like he wanted a minute away from the loud noise just to talk to her, but if her track record when it came to things like this were anything to go by, this wasn't going to get them anywhere. Angela just shrugged. She was dimly aware of the fact that she currently held some kind of morbid record for the longest time spent with absolutely no interest whatsoever in potential adopters, but that knowledge tend to hurt more than she cared to admit, so she mostly ignored it. She had found that ignoring pain altogether made it easier to deal with.

"Ya know why that is?" he asked.

"Because there's nothing special about me," she replied robotically, internally flinching as the words came out. She hadn't meant for it to be verbal and it almost pained her to look back up at the man, for fear he would react poorly to her answer. Still, the words rang true, came directly from her heart, and as she continued to stare at her feet, she could feel tears stinging the back of her eyes for the first time in months. If there was one thing she had learned in her three years spent at this orphanage, it was that she was just a face in a crowd. A statistic. Nothing more.

Torbjörn frowned at her. "I can promise ya, that's not why." He placed a calloused hand on her chin, gently tilting her eyes upward to meet his. He smiled down at her. "The problem is that yer too special." As Angela blinked at him in confusion, the short man steered her toward a bench resting on the outside of a small playground, inviting her to sit down next to him. With a sigh, he turned to face her once more.

"I've met a lot of kids just like you, Angela. Yer fed lies all yer life, until you actually start believing them yerself. Ya don't fit a mold, so ya get labeled as an oddity. I could tell the second I laid eyes on you that yer not timid or shy, ya just don't act like kids yer age are expected to act. That's what we call potential."

"I always thought it just made me different," she murmured quietly, refusing to buy into such an idea.

"Nothing wrong with that!" Torbjörn replied. "Ya just need to find people who understands you. Gotta be able to see Angela, and not who they think Angela should be." He paused for a second to clap a hand to her shoulder. "Yer damn smart."

Angela shook her head. "I just like to learn. That doesn't make me-"

"That's not what the staff here says," he cut her off gently. "When I arrived here, the first thing I asked old Kaiser was who her problem child was." His smiled returned. "And I don't mean the one that misbehaves the most, but the one that needed a home more than any other one."

"And she pointed you to me?" Angela asked, almost refusing to believe that.

"Yer name came up, among others. She told me yer a damn genius, Angela. That all ya do is read, all ya _want_ to do is learn. That yer not satisfied with what other people teach, that you take it upon yerself to go above and beyond. That might be the reason yer still here after three years, but I get ya." Angela watched him as he stood up. She could feel a small spark lighting up at her chest at the direction the conversation seemed to be going, but quickly tried to bite it back. Hope was not something she could afford to have.

"I've taken in many children before, Angela. I look for the ones with potential, the ones life have been unkind to. Children like you." He clapped his other hand to her shoulder, kneeling down directly in front of her, gruff face contorted into a gentle, inviting expression. "There's nothing in you _but_ potential. Ya got that fire to yer eyes that makes a world-changer. Believe me, ya don't belong in a place like this."

Torbjörn stood up once more. "If ya like the idea of havin' yer own bedroom in more permanent arrangements, I'd be more than willing to open my home to you. Maybe we could even do something about that big brain of yers. Give it a bit of exercise."

Angela felt her breath inhale sharply at those words, her eyes wide in spite of her previous promise to herself that she wouldn't feel hope.

Torbjörn smiled at her. "If ya need time to think about it, I'd be more than happy to stop by later in the week."

Before she even knew what she was doing, Angela shook her head, standing up in half a second, as the tears that had almost started earlier began to slide down the side of her face. "I don't need to think about it!" she rushed out, completely overwhelmed by the turn their conversation had taken. A small voice in the back of her head was telling her to be careful, that she knew nothing about this man or where he came from or how sincere he was truly being, but Angela quickly shut it out. After three years, there was no way she would let an opportunity like this pass her by.

That, and nobody had spoken to her like that since her own parents had.

"I want to go with you," she let out in a choked whisper as tears flowed freely down her face.

Torbjörn smiled at her. "Then there's work to be done."

While Torbjörn met with some of the staff of orphanage, Angela went back to the bedroom, where she quickly began throwing her meager belongings into suitcase that had been under her bed since the day she had first arrived at the orphanage.

"I'm assuming it went well?" a familiar voice asked her, as Angela noticed Mrs. Kaiser standing in the doorway. The excitement on her face must have been answer enough, for the old woman approached her, wrapping her up in a tight hug

"I'm so proud of you," she murmured.

It was bittersweet, in a way. Angela had never had a friend in orphanage, she had never belonged to any groups, didn't even have a relationship with any of the caretakers. She had always kept to herself, been quiet to a fault, and never once felt at home there, but she could still feel a part of her heart aching at the woman's touch. It was nothing like the heartbreak that had haunted the last several years of her childhood, but it hurt in its own way, knowing this was probably the last time she would ever see this woman, who had acted as the closest thing she had to family for years. She truly was going to miss her. Mrs. Kaiser was the only person who ever acted like she cared her even remotely since her parents had been taken from her.

It was only when Mrs. Kaiser pulled back from her, absolutely beaming, that Angela realized those words had been uttered out loud. "You're such a sweet little girl." She tucked a lock of her platinum blonde behind her ear. "Don't miss me, Angela. I want you to walk out that door, and never look back."


	2. Chapter 2

A/N:

Special thanks to kinaesthetic for helping me reason what the fuck a nanite even is, let alone how they function and what they look like. You all should 100% check out her stuff over on AO3, she's an amazing writer.

I have no idea when the hell Vishkar came into existence in the Overwatch universe, so I'm taking a liberty in this chapter and saying it's already around and hard-light technology is at least somewhat accessible to the scientific community. I'm 99% that the Guardian Angel wings of Mercy's Valkyrie suit is made of hard-lights anyway, so...

Retcon: I said in the first chapter that Torb originally took Angela back to Sweden. That's not the case anymore. I decided since Overwatch's main base was in Switzerland it would make sense for his entire family to be relocated to Switzerland. it's also required for a point in this chapter, so that's been edited.

* * *

Life with Torbjörn and Ingrid Lindholm was different from any other home Angela had ever had. She had been expecting that; they were, after all, not her parents, but also far more compassionate toward her than almost anyone at the orphanage had been. Despite being very much a family unit, there were a lot of kids who also lived in their household. They were all just like her. There were eight of them in all, and they call came from different countries, different backgrounds, of different races, but they all had one thing in common: every single one of them was orphans who had been displaced by war.

However, there was never any lack of love and encouragement from the Lindholms. It was very clear to Angela that she was seen very much as an individual by both of them, not a face in a crowd. It was something she _needed_ , had been missing for years, and she appreciated it more than she cared to admit. She was still quiet and preferred to keep to herself, but nobody in her new home criticized her for it.

In the year following her leaving Switzerland to live with the Lindholms, the word Overwatch started to become a household name. It was a small group of scientists and soldiers and inventors. They called themselves a foundation, but most people started to call them heroes. Since Overwatch was formed sometime shortly after her eleventh birthday, it was almost alarming how quickly attacks from Omnics began to decline; the taskforce slated with the sole duty of keeping humanity safe from the machines was frighteningly effective. That also meant that it was very, very exclusive in who was allowed to join its ranks. Only the best of the best were chosen: world-renowned snipers, the highest-ranking soldiers in militarizes from around the globe, the most intelligent scientists in the world.

Torbjörn was among their ranks. He never went into detail about what he did, what his job entailed. He merely called himself their engineer. As his work would keep him busy, Torbjörn would often disappear for weeks and even months at a time. On the uncommon occasion that he was home, however, he was almost always in his workshop. That was where he and Angela really bonded. He quickly took a special interest in Angela, and Angela, in turn, was fascinated by the things he would create. He was constantly making weapons or armors to be used on the field with his forge, constantly trying to make them more effective, to serve Overwatch's purposes better.

While Angela was always very interested in the stories he would tell about working with Overwatch, Angela also found herself a bit uneasy around Torbjörn's prototype weapons. They brought back memories that were better left hidden in her brain. Still, she listened to every word the man told her, remembered every detail of his metalworking and process of inventing new technology. Occasionally, he would let her help her with his hands-on creations, always watching her with a careful eye, patiently correcting her when she did something wrong. When Angela got something right, she'd aways beam at him and he'd reply with an impressed laugh and ruffle her hair before saying "That's ma girl."

When Torbjörn was away performing tasks for Overwatch, Angela spent her free time either reading or helping Ingrid around the house. Ingrid was patient and very kind and sometimes even tried to speak to her in her native German. As broken as it was, it always made Angela smile.

On her twelfth birthday, Ingrid made her a cake baked specifically with Swiss chocolate. Angela felt a pit drop into her stomach at the mere sight of it, of the smell that wafted through the dining room at the whole family of ten gathered around the huge table to celebrate. It was the first time in four years that her birthday had been so much as acknowledged, the first time that anybody had cared enough to make her feel important, to feel wanted. The chatter at the dinner table went as normal, like it did any meal, but when Ingrid placed a piece of the cake in front of her, Angela had only taken a tiny nibble of it before tears sprang to her eyes, and she allowed her body to be wracked by sobs she tried to suppress. It reminded her far too much of her own mother's cooking, her own family, her own home, and how much she thought that she'd never have anything like it again in her life.

Rather than seem alarmed by her reaction, Ingrid just smiled and moved her chair closer to Angela's as to draw her into a warm hug. After only a second of contact, Angela buried her face against her chest, throwing her arms around her neck.

"Thank you," she whimpered, over and over again. Ingrid gently rubbed small circles on her back.

"Of course, my dear. We want you to be happy here."

"I am," she managed to hiccup between her shuddering sobs, her voice still muffled. "I really am."

* * *

From the moment they brought her home, Torbjörn and Ingrid adopted old terms when referring to her. Genius. Prodigy. Gifted. Special. Angela never complained, as she had known for years she was different from other children. At least they encouraged her. It could be much, much worse.

Angela wasn't sure exactly what set her down the path of medicine, but she knew well before her twelfth birthday that she wanted to be a doctor. Perhaps it was the fact that she had been fascinated with the inner workings of everything she touched from the earliest age that was even possible. Perhaps it was the fact that medicine and health were the very building blocks of leading a fulfilling and fruitful life. Perhaps it was her inherent, deep-rooted desire to help others, and following a profession that centered around saving people's lives just felt right. And perhaps that desire was born from her own experiences, losing her home and her parents at such a young age, and growing up for years with nobody but herself. If someone had been able to save even one of her parents way back then, her life would have played out with a substantial difference.

That's what it came down to. Making a difference. Even if she didn't change the world, even if she saved one person, prevented one child from losing a parent or two parents from losing their child, she would still be making a difference. Maybe not a substantial one, but to make such a difference in even one person's life was worth it, in her eyes. People had always called her a prodigy; a genius, even. Maybe that was true. Maybe she had been gifted. Angela certainly did not believe in such things. She was smart, but she worked damn hard for her knowledge. Hours upon hours upon hours spent with her nose buried in a book, or hunched over a computer to compensate for the average education she received while in the care of an overcrowded orphanage was not some God-given gift. In the hypothetical case it was real, however, what better way to give back to it than to use her gift to help others? There would always be someone somewhere doing damage, someone would always be hurting, someone would always need healing. She'd use her 'gifts' to heal, to give back. Never to destroy, but to mend.

One day, she mentioned her dreams to Torbjörn, who suggested to her that maybe she didn't need to wait around to advance her education. There was a test that schools all over the world offered children like her, he said. Children that were years ahead of others their age. If she did well, she could skip high school altogether, go straight on to undergrad school if she really wanted to. Both of her foster parents seemed to think she didn't need to waste time with high school, that she could get a jump start on her career even at her excessively young age. Of course, they left the choice up to her.

Angela Ziegler was only twelve years old when she quietly completed her secondary education. In a week after taking the exam, she was pulled out of class by the principle, and promptly informed that she had not only passed the test, but passed with the highest score in the school's history. Angela had immediately requested the school to mail out her diploma, rather than walking the stage with some kind of special honors for such a contrived reason.

Undergrad University, it turned out, was far, far harder than she had ever imagined it would be. She'd sit in classes besides adults, most of them at least double her age, trying to make sense of terms and concepts that were not intended for children to have any grasp of, let alone understand. Her professors tried to be accommodating, tried to dumb things down for her, but Angela was vehemently opposed to that from day one. She wasn't there to be babied. Some of her classmates gave her weird looks, but most of them just ignored her. She was a literal infant as far as age was concerned compared to most of them, and they would never see her as a friend or an equal because of that.

Angela was fine with that. Much like with every other aspect of her life, Angela kept to herself, feeling horrifically out of place on a university campus. Still, she knew why she was there, and she did not let herself get distracted by the side glance of adults nearly old enough to be her parents. Her unease passed as quickly as it came; she fell into a routine and gained a numbness to the reaction of those around her. She deserved to be there, she'd often have to remind herself. She had earned it, and that wasn't something she would ever allow herself to take lightly.

While the Lindholms were far from knowledgeable about anything related to medicine or medical science, they helped her every step of the way. There were dozens upon dozens of times where she became overwhelmed, where so much information was crammed into her young brain that she felt like it might burst, where she'd break out into frustrated tears over the notes and assignments. She almost quit more times than she could count, but Ingrid and Torbjörn were always there to help her, to support her, to offer their input and encouragement, to make sure that she didn't buckle under the stress of college at such a young age.

Undergrad University caused Angela to age very quickly. Too quickly, some might have said, but her childhood was filled with research and notes and homework instead of games and friends. Angela one time heard Ingrid expressing concerns to her husband over the idea of it robbing her of a real childhood. Angela hadn't said anything, but she knew that medical school wasn't what had ruined her childhood. War had. Violence had. The only thing medical school had done was give her a purpose, a resolve to do her part to help others, to make the world a better place. She had always been years ahead of other kids her age; the rigid difficulty of university studies had only served to put her even farther ahead than she had ever been.

When Angela Ziegler was fifteen, she completed her undergrad program and continued her education at one of the most prestigious medical schools in Switzerland. By that point, however, Angela became rather fascinated by more than the medical side of her field. Her PhD-MD was, of course, the ultimate goal, but research, the life of a scientist, was something that strongly appealed to her. Doctors did well enough; they saved people who came under their care, they helped others. The truly revolutionary practices - the ones who changed the world - however, were performed by scientists, medical researchers. Angela wanted to do both. She wanted to invent, to change the world, while helping as many people as she could. She had only been in medical school for two months when Angela started to look critically at the field of applied nanobiology.

The idea of using intelligent machines for health care purposes came to her on a whim one day, as she was in his workshop listening to Torbjörn explain to her the concepts of a portable battlefield turret he was working on, one with a very limited AI that could be programmed to pick out specific targets and focus on them. AI was simple enough to create and install in mechanical devices, could be programmed to do almost any simple task. In a lot of ways, medicine was the same way. Injections, pills, tonics - they were created for specific purposes, they had goals they were meant to achieve once they entered a person's body. She was immediately curious upon coming to that realization if it was maybe possible to have AI to do the same job as remedies. If a machine could be programmed to do instantaneously what it took an antibiotic three days to achieve, that would change the face of medicine as they knew it.

Her university was equipped with a laboratory that students could use at will. The school wasn't too awfully concerned about what exactly went on there; it was exclusive enough that the idea of the labs being abused was almost comical, so Angela had a lot of resources at her disposal to work with making a solid first model of her new idea.

Her first prototype was simple; it was just a small sphere about the size of a tennis ball with retractable legs and arms that could grasp tiny, light things like alcohol pads and band-aids. She named it Baymax, out of a complete and utter lack of creativity and her long-lived love of the ancient Disney movies the Lindholms always watched with them. It was incredibly primitive and the AI was barely intelligent at all; it was an intentional decision on Angela's part. She knew she had to work her way up; truth be told, she didn't even know if Baymax would be viable as anything more than an expensive nurse. She was grateful she had spent so much time watching Torbjörn in his workshop as a young child, because it had created an inherent ability to create machines.

For the first test run, she programmed the AI to search out and treat surface wounds and activated the machine. After a simple scan of her arm, it only took it about twenty seconds for it to fold back her sleeve and find the self-inflicted cut, clean it off with a q-tip dipped in peroxide, and cover it with a band-aid. It was simple; just the most basic of first-aid care, but it was her creation. She had made it with her own two hands, she had come up with the idea for it, she had programmed the AI. It was hers. Angela was grinning ear-to-ear as Baymax scurried to her other arm, scanned it and deactivate itself when it found no more injuries.

She knew deep in her heart that she was on to something with this invention.

By her sixteenth birthday, Angela had moved on to her second generation of machines, which she named Project Baymax. They were smaller this time, and instead of being burdened by preexisting retractable limbs, she had moved on to programming a very dumbed-down version of hard-light technology, that would allow it to create tools and limbs out of thin air as needed.

Her original prototype very quickly became obsolete, to the point where it was almost useless, but Angela found herself growing somewhat attached to it. She reprogrammed it's AI, made it somewhat intelligent, but with no real task or point to existing; she just allowed Baymax to scurry around like a pet. She added a HUD to the front of the machine, giving it eyes that could change to any form it wanted, as well as small speakers and a voice box that allowed it to communicate with her with beeps and whirls. She'd always find herself grinning when she caught sight of Baymax on her bedroom desk at night, or when it would do inconvenient things like handing her its fifth pencil or coving her homework with blank sheets of paper. Shortly after the reprogramming, she affectionately started to refer to the machine as a "he".

Starting with the second generation, however, Angela felt her creations had hit a roadblock. They were useful, they served a purpose, but they weren't doing anything better than what a doctor could do, and that wasn't what she had intended when the idea first came to her mind. To be truly effective, they would need to be able to fix things from the inside out. She discovered the solution by chance one day while skimming through some medical journals about biotic medicine. A few years prior, a team of scientists from the UK had created a solution for weak bones that took the shape of near-microscopic machines that once implanted in the body, strengthened bone mass throughout the entire skeleton.

The next generation of machines in Project Baymax was just as small as a gnat, and the hard-lights within them were designed to release medications. They had to be programmed to complete a very specific task, with the intention of being inserted into the region of the body they were meant to effect. That was also when her work had to be tested on sick living organisms to see if they truly worked. As much and Angela was confident in her creations, she also knew that no force on earth would possess her to allow herself to be the test subject to see if these things actually worked.

She finally gave her creations a real name: nanites. Using a mix of sick rabbits and rodents from her university's lab, Angela spent the next year spending every second of her free time toying with the nanites, improving them, watching where they weren't working and brainstorming how to fix them. With the incorporation of the hard-light technology, nanites were capable of creating medicine for any form of ailment almost on command, so long as they were programmed to do so. Not every generation was successful, however; she had to rework their functions, their size, their purposes dozens upon dozens times before she began to see consistent success across well over one-hundred of different test subjects. She occasionally published her progress in medical journals that sparked interest from some people, but it was never anything revolutionary.

As her research went on, and she grew ever closer to graduating with her doctorate, she finally hit a breakthrough. She kept her research widely to herself; her journals only covered the absolute bare minimum of her findings, but her foster parents had a strong enough idea of what she was doing. Ingrid had a cat that had been blind for a few years; it was getting on in years, and she urged Angela to see if her nanites could restore the animal's vision. Angela had hesitated, out of fear of making the pet very sick, but Ingrid's faith in her had eventually won over. Within five minutes of injecting nanites into the cat's cornea, he started to blink rapidly, actually looking around the room. Angela's own eyes widened in awed shock when the cat started to react to the environment around himself as he did years ago when he could see. A huge grin spread across the young inventor's face as Ingrid hugged her.

"We're so proud of you, Angela."

Without even replying, she took off to her bedroom in a dead sprint, pulled up a word processor on her laptop and became to rapidly type down her latest discovery. While her fingers ran across her keyboard, practically jittery with excitement, Baymax scampered up her arm and tried to pull her hair out of her eyes and into a poor excuse for a ponytail with a rubber band. Angela let out a laugh and gently picked the robot up with her hand, finishing his work with her other hand as she sat him down on the table. She idly stroked Baymax's metal frame, smiling fondly down at the sphere as his eyes took the shape of vertical brackets and he hummed at her. That was where it all started. She owed so much to that prototype, as primitive as it was.

Her recent findings were published in a medical journal, that very quickly gained far more attention than anything else she'd ever written.

The older she got, the more Angela found herself growing opposed to war and violent conflicts, and there were certainly aspects to Overwatch she did not like. As much as it had succeeded in its goal of stabilizing the Omnic crisis, and as much as they claimed to stand for peace and justice, to protect the innocent, the organization was far more militaristic than she imagined it had any right being. Overwatch had started to dabble in other matters, such as politics and combating a widespread terrorist cell named Talon that had been around for decades. So she was very surprised one night, a few weeks after she became the first people to truly cure blindness in a living creature, that Torbjörn stepped into her bedroom around two in the morning while she was writing an essay. He told her that Overwatch wanted her to come for a tour of their facilitates. Initially, Angela had balked at the idea, but Torbjörn firmly reminded herself that she wasn't committing to anything by just visiting. They just wanted to talk to her, he claimed, so she begrudgingly agreed to go to work with him the next day.

* * *

The first figure to meet her was a dark-skinned woman who looked to be about forty with jet-black hair that fell down to the middle of the back. Her left eye was covered by a tattoo of a symbol that Angela did not recognize. The posture the woman held herself with was admittedly intimating, but as they got closer, her stern face broke into a smile that could only be described as motherly.

She offered Angela her hand. "Angela Ziegler, I take?" she asked, her voice warm and holding an Egyptian accent. Angela took her hand with a nod. "We've heard much about you. My name Ana Amari. It's a pleasure to meet you in person." Angela blinked in surprise at the name Amari; she had definitely heard of Captain Amari. She was one of the leaders of Overwatch if she remembered correctly. Most of the heroes who formed the foundation had names that were well-known and commonplace and while Angela certainly had never idolized any of them, meeting the second-in-command of Overwatch in person was a little more mind-blowing than she'd admit.

However, within seconds of the introductions, she heard screaming coming from the far side of the room, as a door swung open. _"MUM!"_ a young voice shrilled, as a child who looked no older than twelve years old ran directly toward Ana. Ana only barely managed to suppress an eye roll before she turned to look at the girl. She very strongly resembled Ana; they had the same skin tone, the same hair color, and even their faces looked similar.

"I'm busy, Fareeha," she said, tone stern. "What in heavens-"

Ana's voice was drowned out by the door slamming open again, as another figure passed into the room.

"Whatever she's tellin' ya, it's a damn lie!" the newcomer rushed out. He was older, looked to be about Angela's age, with an overpowering south American accent and a scruffy appearance that reminded her heavily of a cowboy from old western movies.

Ana's face quickly shifted to exasperation as the man moved to where Fareeha had been standing, and the little girl stepped behind her mother. "Can you two behave for five minutes?" she snapped out with a sigh. I'm in the middle of something import-"

"I didn't do nothin'!" the man snapped, cutting her off, and jabbing his finger at the girl. "She-"

"Jesse, are you the twelve-year-old or the seventeen-year-old?" Ana asked him in a flat tone, eyebrow arched in a way that told Angela this was not an unusual situation for the three of them to be in.

"You know how old I am," he grumbled.

"Than act it," she snapped back. "This isn't a playground. You're nearly an adult. Act like it."

For a second, Angela shifted her blue eyes down to Fareeha, who stuck her tongue out at Jesse from where she stood behind her mother's waist. Angela looked back to Jesse for a moment, caught sight of the absolutely indignant look on his face, and let out a snort of laughter that she only barely disguised as a sneeze.

Angela's noise caught the attention of Jesse, who shifted his brown eyes over to her very quickly.

"Ah," he droned, "you must be the new blood."

Angela blinked at him. "New blood?"

"The newcomer. The baby. The inno-"

"I know what new blood means," she replied somewhat impatiently. "I just never-"

"Ms. Ziegler is here to visit, and nothing more," Ana told Jesse instead. With one hand, she gently nudged Fareeha out from behind her and toward the cowboy. "Both of you, go find something do. I'm going to be busy with our guest and do not wish to be interrupted."

"You hear that, runt?" Jesse laughed, looking back at the girl. "I'm the boss."

"You couldn't boss a baby," Fareeha jabbed back with a speed that was very impressive for her young age. Before she left the room with Jesse, Fareeha turned to look up at her, brown eyes sparkling with a childlike wonder that she couldn't help but smile at. The girl just returned her look with a grin before saying, "I think you're gonna love it here!" With that declaration, she left the room, leaving Angela with Ana again.

"I apologize for that interruption. Sometimes things can get a little rowdy around here."

The smile finally faded from her lips. "I'm not entirely sure why I was invited here."

"Is it not obvious, Angela?" Ana's voice retained her calm tone.

Angela furrowed her brow for a few seconds but finally shook her head. "I'm sorry, but it's not. I haven't even graduated medical school yet, and, to be honest, I'm not Overwatch's biggest fan," Angela said carefully, trying to read the other woman's facial expressions, but Ana managed to keep her face very neutral. "I...don't like war, I don't like conflict, and I don't like groups who seek those things out." She made sure to not waver from Ana's eye contact for even a moment. "Overwatch has done amazing things for the world, I'm not denying that for a second, but I don't think its a place I could ever feel comfortably aligned with.

To her surprise, Ana didn't take her words with any kind of negativity. She actually let out a small chuckle. "Spoken like a true pacifist. Torbjörn told us about that. Before you pass judgment, I'd like you to meet with our other Commanders, and maybe a few of the agents who already have found a home here. Would you be opposed to that?"

Angela thought about it for a few seconds but shook her head. "No, that's fine." There would be no harm in just meeting a few new faces; she knew she wasn't going to take a job with Overwatch anyway.


End file.
